Webinars & Podcast
To suggest a topic or person for our webinar and podcast series,
contact our Knowledge Exchange Fellow, Jez Fredenburgh: [email protected]
contact our Knowledge Exchange Fellow, Jez Fredenburgh: [email protected]
Peatlands are incredible - globally they cover 3% of land area but hold more than twice the carbon in all the world’s forests. But managing them is a conundrum and a balancing act between short and long term food security, biodiversity, climate, and livelihoods: Their carbon-rich soils make them food-producing power-houses (accounting for 30-40% of UK-grown potatoes and vegetables) but also significant carbon emitters when drained and cultivated (1% of UK carbon emissions). Those who farm peatlands are often acutely aware of this issue, but don’t know what to do: Rewetting peatlands can lock this carbon back up and improve biodiversity, but rewet them too much and they start to emit methane, and of course displace food production elsewhere and potentially impact livelihoods too. So, what should we do? Prof Heiko Balzter, from the University of Leicester, unravels this topic for us: Last year he convened 40 researchers and peatland farmers in the East Anglian Fens, an area that accounts for around 27% of England’s total peatland, and on which 4,000 farms and 80,000 livelihoods depend. Prof Balzter will present his main findings and possible ways forward.
Heiko covers:
About Heiko: Prof Heiko Balzter is a professor of Physical Geography and Director of the Institute for Environmental Futures. His research interests include carbon accounting, Earth observation and remote sensing of land use and forests. He has received numerous awards for his research, including the Royal Geographical Society’s Cuthbert Peek Award ‘for advancing geographical knowledge of human impact through earth observation’ (2015). He leads UKRI’s Landscape Decisions Programme and NERC’s National Centre for Earth Observation’s International Programme, and he was an AFN Network+ Champion 2022-2023.
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